I apologize if "purpose" was a poor word choice. The applicable test is whether or not it's being used verbatim or in a transformative way.

Political campaigns are inherently informative (in a "free speech" sense) and non-profit. While commercial use matters in general, it'd be a seriously uphill battle to claim a profit motive - even if they're spewing disinformation and raking in the cash.

No joke, there are fewer ads on broadcast TV than on (free) YouTube now. Broadcast averages 14 minutes per hour. YouTube is harder to find hard numbers but most sources imply it's around 20 minutes per hour - A whopping third of the total viewing time.

Of course, that depends on having something worth watching on (you'd likely be surprised how many channels you get, but they still mostly suck); and for those of us not using a GooTube-sponsored browser that breaks ad blocking, with uBlock Origin that figure drops to zero minutes per hour.

More practically - Broadcast TV is great for having something random on in the background, and it never pauses to ask if you're still watching. If you're trying to see something specific, though, it's no contest - Streaming is vastly superior in nearly every way.

The lawyers (and IANAL) already understand that, which is why they're stressing the "potential damage to these IPs" angle.

Fair use as it applies to a political campaign has four main tests:
The purpose of the infringing use (must be transformative, which this is);
The nature of the work (creative, which this is, receives less protection than factual);
The amount of material and its importance in the original context (each infringement here is tiny); and
The impact on the market for the original work.

IMO, that last point would be the key issue in this situation. It honestly passes the first three tests with flying colors, but it also very likely adversely affects the market for the original content. A third of the country actively avoids anything and everything related to the current administration. If people are plausibly likely to believe Nintendo / Shueisha / Publisher-X don't object to these uses of their material - And the general public have no clue this battle is even going on - They will stop buying it.

Yeah, that's not what fair use means in US law. But I really doubt that a case could be made that this was fair use.

It may be a good decision in some ways, but it's clearly illegal.

No, it's going to need to let YOU navigate the grass lot. That it CAN manage the driving doesn't mean that it has to do it all the time.

We can supplement human vision with those technologies. Currently less than 1% of US cars have any LIDAR capabilities whatsoever, and you'll find a substantial number don't even have backup cameras (only required since 2018).

As for how useful they are, I respectfully disagree. The first thing I, and many others, do when driving a car with a million and one distracting "safety" features is disable most of them. Yes, I know perfectly well I'm drifting out of my lane, now stop nagging me so I can focus on avoiding the real danger a quarter mile ahead!

Well, the real advantage is that if they guess wrong on which flu strain is going to dominate next year they can change the formula quickly. There are other advantages, but most of them don't affect as many people.

Actually, above about a 20 mph difference in speeds I don't believe that humans CAN gage distance and speed well enough. And I may well have overestimated the minimum speed delta. (Admittedly some of that is reaction time rather than an estimation problem.) We do better with things that are off to one side, because there we can judge based or angles.

I suspect that they are currently better, on the average, than the average human driver, but that they have DIFFERENT edge cases. That would explain both the statistics reported and the news stories.

At face value, very much so. I'm not going to panic until the next decade of appeals plays out, though.

This first round was against defendants who didn't even bother showing up to court (and let's be honest, there really wasn't any viable defense they could have offered here). Thanks to this overly broad injunction, the deep pockets of every ISP and cloud hosting provider in the US now has standing to get involved - And they will, since the precedent this sets could cost them real money in the future.

"Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there's that proof of existence"

If Waymo's argument is valid, then humans shouldn't be allowed to drive.

The problem is therefore either solvable purely via optical methods, or this is merely a prelude to banning all of us from driving. And if that's the real end goal, why are we messing around with self-driving single- (or low-) occupancy vehicles rather than investing in viable mass transit?

Not the GP, but I suspect an awfully lot of us have zero interest in "owning" the second most expensive possession most of us have, if we're not allowed to operate them ourselves.

Sorry, but that's too extreme. It has *less* missing information to infer. And how much less is going to depend on both the sensors and the environment. (And it's also possible to be overwhelmed by information to the extent that you miss the obvious problem.)
I expect that automated cars are better at driving than people are already, but they can easily be oversold.

You are overselling current automated cars. They may be better on the average, but there are lots of specific scenarios where they aren't. (And "better" is a lot short of perfect.)
However, I'd prefer one over my capabilities, even if I just had to avoid the edge cases.

Highways are generally an easier problem to solve, but the errors are more dangerous. And there are some places that are quite poorly designed...so they AREN'T easier in those places. (I'm thinking of one particular intersection where two freeways merge and then quickly split, so one frequently needs to cross 6 poorly marked lanes in less than 1/4 mile or take a 1/2 hour detour through local streets.)